A collection of Washington state symbols, natural history style

On Nov. 11, 2014, Washington state turns 125. In the spirit of celebrating, we highlighted 12 objects in the Burke collections that are quintessentially Washington—at least according to the Revised Code of Washington (RCW), a compilation of all laws enacted by the state's Legislature.

Washington has 22 official state symbols to date under the RCW, and 12 of them can be found at the Burke Museum—the Washington state museum of natural history and culture since 1899. We care for these objects, and millions more, as a record of nature and culture to help us to understand how the choices we make today will affect the future.

Here are the 12 Washington state symbols in the Burke collections:


State Tree: Western Hemlock

The western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) is found in Washington's temperate rain forests. This evergreen conifer can grow up to heights of 230 feet, with the longest living specimen being more than 1,200 years old; it became the State Tree in 1947. Fun fact: new-growth needles can be steeped to make vitamin-rich tea. Date collected: May 6, 1967.

What do you collect? 10 unique visitor collections

Over the past four months, we've asked Burke Museum visitors to answer a simple question in our Imagine That exhibit: what do you collect?

"What do you collect?" tags hang in the Burke's Imagine That exhibit.

As the Washington state museum of natural history and culture, we collect to form a record of the life before us and to bring together people, objects and the stories that make them meaningful. We share a curiosity and passion for collecting with our visitors.

So far, more than 2,000 visitors have told us what they collect and why their collection is special. While we see several types of collections come up regularly—rocks, shells, money—some collections stood out as particularly unique.

Here is a sampling of 10 one-of-a-kind visitor collections shared with us so far:

1. Woodchips with holes

First name: Diane

What I collect: Woodchips with holes

My collection is special because... It began with a child giving me one, and then another, and another... and now I have hundreds!!

Making connections through Burke collections

In honor of this year's International Museum Day, I sat down with one of our curators, Dr. Holly Barker, also a University of Washington (UW) anthropology professor, to talk about some of the connections she’s seen UW students make when she’s invited them into the Burke’s ethnology collections.


Tangible connections. Students in one of Holly’s independent
study groups making pump drills, an ancient tool that’s
being revitalized in today’s carving practices.

Model Chinese junks sail on

By Arn Slettebak
Exhibits Department

A junk from Fujian Province.

I’ve always had a keen interest in studying the endless variety of objects made by people around the world over thousands of years. Recently, I’ve turned my focus to the fascinating models of Chinese sailing ships, or Chinese junks, in our Ethnology collection (which is chock full of all kinds of cultural objects).

A one-of-a-kind shell collection



Dr. Phil Nudelman, a retired business executive from Bellevue, Washington, and a UW graduate, recently donated a collection of more than 100,000 shells to the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. 

Museum Collections and the Story of Life on Earth

How do we really know what happened before we were here?

Objects are the key to understanding the story of life on earth. Many of us have personal collections that remind us of the past - people, places, and experiences. At the Burke Museum, we care for 15 million objects (and counting!) in our natural and cultural collections.

We gather and hold these objects as a record of nature and culture – and use them to generate new knowledge and celebrate our shared heritage (see some of these objects in our ever-growing Facebook album).

What can objects tell us about the world around us, and the life before us? These are the questions that motivate Burke researchers every day.

Watch this short video for a glimpse into our collections and the people who care for, and learn from, these objects to help better understand the world around us:

Plastics in our Collections: A Sign of the Changing Material Culture?

"Before Plastics" objects on display

in the Plastics Unwrapped exhibit

The Burke Museum’s new exhibit, Plastics Unwrapped, examines how plastics went from being rare to being everywhere in a short period of time, and how material culture was changed by plastics.

To help visitors explore what life was like before plastics, several objects from the Burke’s ethnology collections – made from a range of materials found in nature – are on display. These objects include: a rain hat made of twined cedar bark, a child’s waterproof parka made of seal gut, toy blocks made of wood, and containers made of clay.

That made me wonder, will more and more plastic objects begin to make their way into the Burke Museum’s permanent collections as a reflection of this shift in material culture?

I asked Rebecca Andrews, ethnology collections manager, and she pointed me towards several objects in the ethnology collection that are either partially or fully comprised of plastic. For example:

Tracked at the molecular level: Wolverines return to the North Cascades



Logan was live-captured for the first time on January 24, 2013
near Easy Pass. (Photo by U.S. Forest Service).

Wolverines are one of the rarest and most elusive mammals in North America. After being hunted to extinction in Washington state in the 1930s, they’re finally starting to return to the northern Cascade Range.

Keith Aubry, research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, has led a study to track wolverines found in Washington since 2006. Each winter, he and his team carefully live-capture wolverines, like “Logan,” the young male in the photograph to the right, to document their appearance, sex, age, and condition.

Parrington artifacts: A collector's story



Vernon L. Parrington in his office at the University of
Oklahoma, ca. 1905. Photograph courtesy of Sarah Parrington.

Objects in museums hold many stories—often of their makers and users, and also, sometimes, of their collectors.

That's the case with several beautiful Native American artifacts recently donated to the Burke Museum from the family of Vernon Louis Parrington, a longtime English professor at the University of Washington (UW) in the early 1900s.

Parrington was born in Illinois in 1871. He graduated from Harvard College in 1893 and taught English for four years at Emporia College in Kansas before moving on to teach at the University of Oklahoma.

Two million fish ear bones contain new environmental insights

 

The rings on a fish otolith.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Eustatic
Creative Commons license

The rings in a tree stump can tell us a lot about the age and growth patterns of the tree, but did you know similar records are hidden inside the tiny ear bones of fishes?

The Burke Museum's fish collection is currently cataloging and moving a collection of nearly two million of these fish ear bones, called otoliths, to join our rapidly expanding collections and provide valuable information to researchers.

Most fishes have three small ear bones, called otoliths, located on each side of the rear of the skull, which aid in balance and hearing. Like a tree, the largest of the otoliths develop rings that contain all kinds of valuable information: where the fish was born, what it ate and the conditions and depth of the water that it swam in—all of which provide clues about environmental factors such as climate change and how they impact species and populations. Some fishes, such as the rockfishes, can live 100 years or more—giving researchers an entire century’s worth of data to study.

Archaeology at an Insane Asylum

Imagine the Archaeology Department’s surprise when they got a call from the WA State Archives requesting help with 12 boxes of artifacts from the Insane Asylum of Washington Territory. 

Turns out that along with the historic hospital records from what has become Western State Hospital in Lakewood, WA, some artifacts were also transferred to the State Archives. The State Archivist realized these collections belonged in an appropriate repository, and contacted the Burke Museum.

But why are there artifacts coming from the Western State Hospital, the State’s psychiatric hospital? Due to the proposed construction of a new wing in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Office of Public Archaeology on the University of Washington campus were called in to investigate the land that is part of the Fort Steilacoom Historic District. 

Archaeologists identified, among other things, remnants of a wooden structure dating to circa 1850-1890 and a privy dating to circa 1850-1920. This site was originally a Steilacoom band winter settlement site. In the 1830s, the site was occupied by Joseph Thomas Heath, who ran a Hudson’s Bay Company farm. It was taken over by the U.S. Army in 1849 when Heath succumbed to measles. The U.S. Army established Fort Steilacoom which housed a military hospital and surgeon’s quarters. The fort was abandoned in the 1868, and was purchased by Washington Territory, in part, to establish a facility for psychiatric patients.

This Fall, a group of UW Museology students from Museum 581: Preservation and Management of Collections, has been working with the Burke Museum's Archaeology department to rehouse and catalog the artifacts found at the site.

The artifacts include glass bottles and fragments, nails, clay pipes, ceramic sherds, metal buttons, bricks and a favorite here in the Archaeology lab, a leather shoe with shoelaces intact. This project provides a learning experience for Museology students in terms of the depth and breadth of archaeological collections, as well as the practical experience of organizing such a varied collection.

Our Favorite Fossils - Anatotitan

My left hand compared to Anatotitan's left foot.

It's true that ugly fossils are important, but that doesn't make giant duck feet any less interesting!

Anatotitan means "large duck" but the critter in question was actually a duck-billed dinosaur (a hadrosaurid). They grew up to 39 feet long - 6 feet short of your average school bus. At that size, it's no wonder his (or her!) foot dwarfs my hand. My palm is about the size of one of his (or her!) toe bones.

Anatotitan lived during the Late Cretaceous - 68 to 65.5 million years ago - at the same time as Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor, pterosaurs, small mammals like Eomaia, marine reptiles and birds. The Cretaceous ended with one of the largest mass extinctions in Earth's history.

Montana (starred) during the Late Cretaceous. (Dr. R. B.)



This fossil was found in the Hell Creek formation in Montana in 1987. University of Washington's Dr. Greg Wilson and his lab dig for fossils and what they find ends up here at the Burke!

You can see this very Anatotitan fossil at the Burke's Dino Day (and you might notice that it's featured on the Anatotitan's Wikipedia page!)

Posted By: Winifred Kehl, Communications

Science Behind-the-Scenes: Paleontology Edition (Part 1)

 Oligocene fossils fill this cabinet.

Have you ever been to the Burke and wondered what's in the rest of the building? Behind the exhibits (actually, under them, around them, and above them!) are offices, the exhibit workshop, and enough cabinets full of wonder to make Indiana Jones jealous.

In this edition of the new feature Science Behind-the-Scenes, meet the Burke's fossil collection and find out the secret of our ugly fossils!

Our gorgeous Xiphactinus guards the ugly palm.

As a paleontologist (someone who studies dinosaurs and other prehistoric life), my favorite cabinets are, of course, the ones filled with fossils. And the Burke has a lot of fossils – over 3 million – including plants, animals, invertebrates (like snails), and even fossilized pollen. Only a few of the Burke's fossils are on display because there's just not enough room to show them all. You can visit dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts in the Life and Times exhibit or see fossilized plants and pollen in the Estella Leopold display under the giant Xiphactinus.

The Ugly Palm

One secret about the fossils that you do get to see on display – they're usually the pretty ones, but not necessarily the most important. Many of the fossils in the cabinets are pretty ugly – but ugly fossils are important! It's not common for living things to fossilize when they die – conditions have to be just right – and every fossil can tell us something about the past.

A great example of this is the fossilized palm plant in the Estella Leopold display. The palm looks like a dark brown bug splat on a grey rock, and it's covered in glue and surrounded by plaster. But this is the first and only palm fossil from the area it was found and it tells us a lot about what that area was like millions of years ago because palm plants need a warm and wet environment to live. Without this ugly fossil, we might not know as much as we do about how the climate in North American has changed over millions of years.

A drawer full of oreodont teeth.

Another fossil treasure that might look like trash is this drawer full of teeth. What good is a drawer full of teeth if you don't have the skull that goes with them? As it turns out, teeth – even without the rest of their bodies – are great for paleontologists to study. Teeth are really hard and preserve better in the fossil record than other bones. Teeth can even tell us whose skull they came from. A mammal paleontologist can tell the teeth of different mammals apart just by looking at them (and maybe using a few reference books). So a drawer full of teeth can tell us what kinds of animals lived in an area and how many of them there were.

And that can tell us all sorts of other things, like how animal communities change, so stay tuned for the Paleoecology edition of Science Behind-the-Scenes! And look for more Science Behind-the-Scenes at the Burke to learn about the mammal, bird, fish, and DNA collections, the collection managers who make research at the Burke possible, and the scientists who use the collections  –  and what they've discovered.
Posted by: Winifred Kehl, Communications